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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

This is a typical Diwali treat at my place and my mom- in- law's signature dish. Just tried this out today. I like this home made version better than store bought ones. Its incredibly tasty and a melt in your mouth treat. It requires a bit of work but worth the effort. So do check out the recipe.

Ingredients

Samba Wheat grains -1 glass( 250 gms approximately)

Sugar-2 1/4 cup ( u can increase if you want it sweeter)

Cardamom pods -10 which were powdered

Cashews-A handful broken

Ghee-10 tablespoons(150 ml approximately)

Soak wheat grains overnight. I added 3 glasses of water to immerse the wheat grains.

Put the wheat grains in a mixer and grind . To extract the milk grind the wheat with one glass of water and extract the milk. The first extract will be thick, the last extract will be watery. I did this procedure thrice. Discard the glutinous mass of wheat. Use a sieve to filter the milk.

The filtered wheat milk will look like this. If you keep this aside, the milk will remain at the bottom and the water will remain on top. I did not discard the water because the wheat milk will coagulate fast and might get charred if not careful.

Now prepare the sugar syrup. Take sugar in a pan add 3/4 cup of water to the sugar. Start stirring it. Take a little bit of milk and add it to the sugar syrup to remove the scum. You can see the scum in the picture above.

Stir this mixture till it attains a single string consistency. You can check the consistency with your finger.

The wheat milk has been added to the sugar syrup. Stir this well till it forms a mass.

Take a little bit of color and add this to the mixture. After this you will have to add cardamom and cashew nuts. You have to keep stirring the mixture well and cannot leave it unattended. You have to keep adding ghee, as you are stirring in stages as it forms a mass.

You can see the I have added the cardamom powder,cashew nuts and ghee and the mixture is forming into mass. The main difficulty in making this sweet is stirring. I had to stir this for 45 minutes.Its better to stir this on a low flame to prevent it from getting charred. This is important if you want to make pieces.

Please check this consistency, the whole mixture has formed a ball.

Grease a plate with ghee. Put the whole mixture on to a plate. Let it cool. Cut into desired shapes.

Cut into desired shapes. I cut them up into a diamond shape. This was not cloyingly sweet but just right. If you like it sweeter please add more sugar. I got 40 pieces for one glass of wheat.